Black and white world

Formula One United States Grand Prix - Qualifying session Can Ferrari's hold on F1 racing be broken? Justin Hynes talks to a…

Formula One United States Grand Prix - Qualifying sessionCan Ferrari's hold on F1 racing be broken? Justin Hynes talks to a Colombian who's tipped to do just that

Juan Pablo Montoya's not in a great mood. So his PR is explaining. He's a bit tired having flown in from somewhere in eastern Europe this morning. The traffic coming from Linate airport in Milan was bad and he's running late.

But he's here, and yes, she knows you booked this interview in Monaco, three months ago, but the demands on his time are crazy. And she hopes he'll play ball. A weak smile. But, hey, you know . . .

And you do. You do know. Montoya has a reputation. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. You've seen it happen. In group interviews in the common area of the Williams motorhome.

READ MORE

A gaggle of journalists reduced to the level of first-year schoolboys hanging on the word of the cool senior kid. All the sniggering when some innocent launches into a junior-school question and gets the blank-faced dismissal.

So you fiddle some more with the notes you didn't make on the plane and await his arrival into the motorhome's meeting room, a sort of Graceland meets Starship Enterprise concoction of TVs embedded in BMW-blue, velour-covered walls.

And, eventually, Montoya drifts in and the first thing he does is punch off the air conditioning. "Jeez," he splutters, wincing at the frigid air. And slumping on to the couch, he mutters a barely audible "hi" and gives you the stare. The first of many.

You imagine that this is some Latin thing, the trademark challenge of a Colombian "macho". Some kind of south American version of Robert De Niro demanding: "Are you talking to me?" So you stare back, momentarily, and realise he's just waiting to begin.

And so you switch on the recorder and blow it from the word go.

"So, how has this tyre protest affected you? Have you struggled with these new Michelin tyres? Sam (Michael, Williams's engineering chief) says there have been problems adjusting, changing toe-ins, front wing set-up. . . "

"Well, you obviously know the answer."

"No I don't." Laugh nervously. "I want to know how you feel about it."

"No problem." Pursed lips, dismissive shrug.

Right then. Battle lines drawn. The recorder's timer reads 42 seconds. It's going to be a long half hour.

Except it isn't. Montoya's reputation as antagonistic, arrogant, dismissive, downright rude, is illusory. Sure, he finds it hard to take sports writers seriously, but then again, who doesn't?

He finds the constant promenading of the great and good in the paddock laughable. But who doesn't?

He finds answering yet another question about going toe-to-toe with Michael Schumacher enervating. But enquiring minds and so forth. It's gotta be done and he does answer with refreshing candour.

But, behind the occasional bit of ennui and the combative stares, behind the slack posture, is a genuinely interesting guy.

Quick-witted, likeable, even unexpectedly charming. And in Formula One that's gold dust. It's like bumping into Keith Richards at a librarians' convention.

"It's just Formula One," he says with a wry smile, when you ask does he enjoy the billion-dollar flummery, the slightly fur-coat-no-knickers glamour that exists everywhere beyond his time in the race car. "You gotta learn to love it. It's hard, but you have to.

"Sure, when I first came in it was a bit tough. You know everyone's so arrogant, but you just have to get on with it. Look, if you don't learn to enjoy it then . . . you see, I don't live it. I'm not like you guys, walking up and down the paddock all day. I don't do that.

"I go forwards and backwards from the motorhome to the garage and that's it. Forwards and backwards. I've got upstairs in the motorhome anyway. Just go up there, switch on Sky, watch some TV."

The truth is, though, Montoya does live it. The paddock's parade of fashion and insatiable appetite for tittle-tattle may pass him by, but the trip from motorhome to garage to car is what wakes him up in the morning.

"This is a business," he admits, "but I like it. Because it's a business, it makes the cars what they are. The money is there to invest in it. That's why Formula One is what it is. The technology, everything. It's awesome.

"The better the team, the better the money. They're gonna have more money to invest in the cars. It makes it go quicker."

And you get the best car? "Yup."

And you might win the championship? "There you go."

And so to the championship. This weekend, in Indianapolis, his chance may come, and go. Monza - "It's been good to me before, why not this weekend?" - wasn't as good as it might have been. The construction of new Michelin tyres following a protest by Bridgestone did affect Williams's performance, though the Milanese circuit was always going to be a high- speed boon to Michael Schumacher's flagging championship bid.

Montoya was lightning fast, but not as dominating as he had been in Germany, before the protest. Schumacher won at a canter. Montoya challenged at the start, was rebuffed, hung on grimly, but got screwed by traffic late on. He took second. He's three points adrift of Schumacher going into this penultimate round at Indy.

"I think I came out of here with the least loss possible," he said after the race. "If I couldn't win, I had to try and finish second and I did. I only lost two points to Michael and I'm three points behind him. It's not over."

But Indianapolis could be the watershed. If Schumacher wins, Montoya needs to finish fifth or better to take the championship battle to the wire in Japan.

"I think Indy will be a good race and I think Suzuka as well," he says. "I've done well at both. Suzuka - I was second two years ago, last year I was fourth. Last year I just needed to finish and to take some points to finish third in the championship. And I did that. This year, it's a different ball game, sure, but you just have to play it as it comes."

And Indianapolis is different to Monza. The sport's cathedral of speed, followed by a mid-western medicine show. On the surface, Indianapolis promises salvation in the form of a mile-long straight off the sport's only banked curves, a straight that brakes with bone-crunching severity into an almost 90-degree turn, perfect for overtaking.

But behind it all is the snake-oil of an infield that meanders through 11 dead slow turns where passing is improbable and, if undertaken, foolhardy.

On their first visit in 2000, the drivers approached the legendary circuit's attempt at Formula One with trepidation. What would the banking do to such finely bred cars? Would the famous yard of bricks at the start-finish line upset them like roller skates on marbles?

They walked away yawning. But Montoya likes it. Feels good about his chances at the track where, three years ago, in his last season before coming into Formula One, he won the USA's most glamorous race, the Indy 500.

"It's a mix, but it's nice," he says. "That's what makes it exciting. You have to make a bit of a sacrifice. You either sacrifice speed for downforce or the other way round. You take all the downforce off and you might do the same lap time as with it all on. The question is what's the best for the race.

"Yeah. There are places to overtake. Turn one. Mainly turn one. And you can get a tow. I passed Michael the first year there with a tow out of them. You get a little bit."

It's delivered like a reverie. Like he's seeing a mental movie of the passing manoeuvre. And then the projector switches off.

"But you know I've won the CART (ChampCar) championship. I won the Indy 500, I've won a F3000 championship, so it's not like it's the first championship I'm going to win in my life. It's nice to win the Formula One championship, but you know I'm not going to celebrate any differently if I do it. And if I don't do it, you know, shit happens. There'll be another year to try. I have to do the best I can and that's as far as I can go."

One game at a time, Motty, one game at a time. It's a platitude and he falls back on it easily. And it's that cavalier attitude that has given rise to the impression of him as careless, even slapdash.

Montoya has always come with the reputation of a swashbuckler. Naturally gifted, but always on the ragged edge. Careless about race-craft and strategy. Lazy even. And a rumoured season-long feud with engineer Sam Michael hasn't helped. The engineer's solid application versus Montoya's free-spirited aggression. And, inevitably, Michael Schumacher is used as the yardstick with which to beat Montoya.

Teutonic calculation in opposition to Latin fire. Montoya sniggers at the comparison.

"Yes, I get in the car, bang! I'm quick, but there's a hell of a lot of things that make the car go quick," he insists. "You still have to work with the engineer, get it right. That job is probably very similar in both cases (he and Schumacher). The amount of work we put into it.

"You have to do the work. Maybe some people like to spend more time looking at the data than others. Some don't like it. Me? When it's needed to look at the data, I look; when it's not needed, I don't.

"Genuinely, though, I like the mechanical things, I like working with that. For fun I fly model aeroplanes and I build them myself. It's a lot of fun."

That rather surprising and uncharacteristic pastime was as a result of a gift from his wife, Connie, recently graduated from law school in Madrid. In Montoya's home town of Bogota, the pair have been elevated to Posh and Becks status. In a recent national survey, Montoya was voted as more popular than President Alvaro Uribe.

He is Ayrton Senna to the Colombians: a hero, a saviour, a demigod. But it's a double-edged sword. Montoya and his family have had to move to Miami, the threat of kidnap being just too great in Bogota.

His family home, a three-bed house in the city's Bavaria district, lies empty, patrolled by guard dogs where once Montoya rebuilt the karts he would race.

He and Connie and his family now divide their time between a three- storey apartment on South Beach in Florida and the ubiquitous racing driver accessory, a Monaco apartment. Montoya has lived a third of his life outside Colombia; it isn't home anymore, Miami is, with its jetskis, kit-surfers, motorcycles, his 27-car garage.

Miami, or whatever race circuit he's at, where members of his immediate family are always in attendance.

And it's another criticism that was aimed his way early in the season, when the points didn't come - when he followed second in Australia with 12th in Malaysia, a DNF in Brazil, seventh at Imola. He got married, the edge is gone.

"No, no, no!" he howls. "It doesn't change anything. People say, 'Oh you don't want to get married, because your focus is going to change.' Michael is five times world champion and I don't know how many kids he's got, two or three? Ralf is married with a kid and he's still right there. I'm married - so what? I don't think it makes any difference.

"Actually, I think you probably get more motivation, better support, everything," he adds. "Yeah, it's nice she's around. I enjoy when she's around because it's a lot of support."

And, to some degree, the coterie of family and friends (most are somehow involved in the Montoya machine) may give him the edge in the upcoming battle.

Whereas Schumacher is widely accused of being a driver who works best when there is no pressure and cracks when battled hard - with Damon Hill in 1994 and 1996 and Jacques Villeneuve in 1997 continually cited as examples - Montoya does not feel pressure. It may be another stock answer, another brush-off, but it's said with such matter-of-factness that you almost believe him.

"I haven't felt the pressure this year. No, at the beginning of the year there was pressure, but . . . now, nothing."

But he dismisses the notion that his family provide the shield. "I do it for myself," he says flintily. "It's a personal thing. I do it because I love it, it's my life and I'll try to do the best job I can. I like winning races, yes I do, and I'll do everything in my power to try to win them."

Tomorrow he has to do it again. Walk the walk from motorhome to garage to car. Watch the rev counter rocket from an idle of 4,000 r.p.m. to a banshee 19,000.

Watch the red lights flicker into life from one to five. Release the launch control.

Chase down a dream.

Drivers championship standings

1 Michael Schumacher (Germany) Ferrari82 points

2 Juan Pablo Montoya (Colombia) Williams79

3 Kimi Raikkonen (Finland) McLaren75

4 Ralf Schumacher (Germany) Williams58

5 Fernando Alonso (Spain) Renault55

6 Rubens Barrichello (Brazil) Ferrari55

7 David Coulthard (Britain) McLaren45

8 Jarno Trulli (Italy) Renault24

9 Mark Webber (Australia) Jaguar17

10 Jenson Button (Britain) BAR12

11 Giancarlo Fisichella (Italy) Jordan10

12 Cristiano da Matta (Brazil) Toyota8

13 Heinz-Harald Frentzen (Germany) Sauber7

14 Olivier Panis (France) Toyota6

15 Jacques Villeneuve (Canada) BAR6

16 Marc Gene (Spain) Williams4

17 Nick Heidfeld (Germany) Sauber2

18 Ralph Firman (Britain) Jordan1